DOCUMENTARY SHORTS MOTHER JONES MAGAZINE
GEORGIA YOUTH VOTE
As the 2024 presidential election approached, the Talking Eyes team started placing bets on Georgia.
Four years earlier, the state was at the center of a political maelstrom and we were there to document it for Time magazine (American Destiny). Back then, two runoff elections resulted in Democratic control over the Senate, and former President Donald Trump demanded that Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger “find” 11,779 votes. We wondered if the state would once again swing Blue and if young people would show up to the polls to sway the outcome as they did in 2020.
To better understand the dynamics in Georgia, Ed Kashi and Julie Winokur attended a week-long training hosted by the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. This bootcamp was designed for politically engaged youth to learn how to mobilize voters. Julie and Ed conducted video interviews with over a dozen young activists, ages 16-32, who shared their convictions about protecting women’s rights, supporting transgender youth, and ending the war in Gaza.
Producer Cat McGrath developed relationships with a dozen local and national partners like the ACLU of Georgia, Alliance for Youth Action, and Race Forward. They told us about their areas of interest and their strategies to mobilize young people to vote. We edited our media into a series of short videos that we and our partners shared widely through social media channels. Students Learn Students Vote included the videos in their voting toolkits and Fair Districts Georgia embedded one of our videos in their monthly newsletter. Our videos were seen over 20,000 times leading up to the election.
We were making an impact, but we still weren’t satisfied. By documenting progressive youth, we had only heard part of the story. We needed to hear from conservative youth, especially in a swing state like Georgia. With support from Mother Jones Magazine, we returned to Georgia and interviewed conservative youth. They offered an entirely different perspective focused on the threat of illegal immigration, inflation, and their perceived threats to free speech coming from the Democratic party. We published these voices in Mother Jones, with their Instagram video garnering over 50,000 views and robust online engagement.
